My father is dead.
I spend some time before he dies participating in a modern-day vigil. My sister texts me that our father is on hospice. At frequent intervals, she sends me stats. Oxygen saturation, IV’s unhooked, a sleep state he may not come out of. This goes on for a few days.
True to an inheritance that is fraught with alliances, broken alliances, factions within factions, egregious boundary violations, a first family, a second family, and a history so pockmarked that it is worthy of a limited series on any streaming service, my sister and I assume our usual positions. There is a primary connection to our father who she will speak to but I will not. My sister feeds me information.
The primary source to our father is with him all the time. A small number of visitors come by to see him. My sister reports back to me.
We discuss how relatively few people come to the bedside. Our father is old and many in his circle have died.
Our father has also burned bridges recently with several family members who, if this happened a few years ago, would likely be at the bedside, but since nothing got mended, they stay away.
Then there are those who would never be at the bedside because he burned the bridges a very long time ago.
There are those who would not go to the bedside because the primary source to my father is there and, like me, they choose to not have contact with this person.
I am the holder of memory, the decoder, the person filling in the blanks of our shared past. My sister sends me photos of our father. I lend context. That’s him during the Cuban missile crisis. That’s his best friend Frankie. People who my sister thinks are blood relatives are not. People she’s never heard of are. I call myself a repository and my sister laughs, but it’s true. I do not want to use my ability - my gift - to keep years and years of genealogical shit straight to make a family tree. But ask me anything and I’m happy to tell you.
I have Covid. I work at an in-person job. HR from my company sends over the latest Department of Health guidelines. The protocols now are so loosey-goosey that I realize on Sunday that I meet the full criteria to return to work on Monday. I also know that any more days off could mean not getting paid, as I’ve already used up most of my PTO. I mask up, go to work, and remain masked up for five days.
I stay the course at work throughout the text vigil my sister and I are carrying on. When my father dies on Thursday morning I go in. I go in the Friday after he dies. I tell no one at my job what happened. I know what they would say, out of kindness, but I don’t want to hear any of it.
I am a person wandering through my days without a blueprint.
The world doesn’t stop because I am having a text vigil with my sister or in deference to my father dying. As luck would have it, life decided to deal me a shitshow, along with, as children’s book author Judith Viorst so aptly put it, one Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
But I go to work anyway. I also watch myself go to work. I think about the girl I was. The grown version of me goes to work and takes the girl along.
A girl whose father leaves her family on her first day of kindergarten might not find it necessary to take time off from work as he sickens, then dies.
When the girl is fourteen years old and scheduled for every other week visitation with the father - visitations that, in retrospect, probably should have been held with a social worker present - he doesn’t show up. He has what was then called a nervous breakdown, moves across the country, tells no one, and goes missing for years. It turns out that the girl never sees the father again.
If the fourteen-year-old girl goes about her business as usual, albeit with trust issues and confusion around attachment - then the grown-up version would logically do the same.
The father surfaces again, wanting to see the girl. He is unable to abide by the most basic boundaries she has for him and is so devoid of empathy that the girl ultimately refuses his proposals for any kind of relationship.
That girl’s refusal sends the now more than grown woman into her place of employment.
A girl who is estranged from her father does not tell her colleagues what happened because their condolences and offers of accommodations would be for a girl with a regular dad, not a girl with this dad. She does not have the bandwidth to tell them the nuances of the situation.
So the girl goes to work. What she does have the bandwidth to do is work hard. She works hard in a way that is reminiscent of her mother and grandmother. She works hard despite the bits of fatigue she still holds from Covid. Her work ethic remains untouched by the vigil and death of a man who had a great deal of trouble getting up in time for work or holding a job. Her matrilineal inheritance assures that she not only goes to work but also sees the irony in the situation.
I don’t know what to say, my father’s sister, my aunt, who is also estranged from my father, says. She DMs me on Instagram.
The girl struggles to put words to what has happened. It has no container. There is nothing that Hallmark makes that can speak to this, no collective vocabulary.
But then it happens. The girl hits upon a simple phrase. The girl I watch grow up with a deadbeat dad is nothing if not resourceful. That girl takes care of business. Now the girl’s phrase is mine.
I’m sorry about the death of your estranged father.
Loss that has no home now has some words. There are no euphemisms, no pretty turn of phrase. There’s no mincing these words either.
I am little and my father takes me to Green Lakes State Park. There are parts of the lake hundreds of feet deep. The water is so clear you can see all the way to the bottom. All my murky, mixed-up feelings give way to the crystalline depth of that lake. My estranged father died. I am sorry that my estranged father died.
